EVENTS

The characterisation of skeptical bloggers as aggressive and sanctimonious is unfortunately nothing new and there are undoubtedly skeptics out there who benefit from reading Hayley Stevens post on the subject but I for one am fed up of how we are characterised. We are seen at best as spoilsports and at worst know it alls robbing the universe of beauty and people of hope. We seem to seen as the lackeys of either big pharma or representatives of some sort of scientific hegemony intent on unweaving the rainbow. But most skeptics aren’t like that in the slightest, we don’t live in a grey universe composed solely of reason and logic, we find wonder and beauty in the near infinite majesty of the Universe and the more we discover the more there is to be awestruck by. [Read more…]

Entire communities throw untold sums of money at the slimmest (nonexistent, really) hope that these patients will recover at the Burzynski Clinic, and the Observer finds this uplifting.

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Uncritically giving a cancer quack uncritical press? How could we possibly have mistaken that for promotion? We should have just called it as it was: a shoddy, pathetic, and irresponsible attempt at journalism. [Read more…]

that concern should have been in the article, but because it was absent doesn’t mean that the paper was promoting the treatment, as some have suggested (“pimping” it, as one science writer so crudely tweeted).

No, the fact that the concern was absent doesn’t mean that the paper was promoting the treatment, but all the same, the paper (via the article) was to some extent promoting the treatment. Bainbridge called it “a pioneering treatment” when it’s a trial rather than a treatment, and “pioneering” makes it sound new and potentially promising as opposed to more than 30 years old and so far not a success. Bainbridge made it sound more promising than it is. How is that not promoting the treatment? [Read more…]

Yet what was intended as a gripping, human-interest story quickly drew a sustained attack on the paper for apparently offering unquestioning support for a highly controversial cancer treatment, known at antineoplaston therapy.

That seems like an unnervingly irresponsible way to look at the matter. However gripping a human-interest story may be, surely it’s irresponsible (at least) to report a campaign to enable a very expensive very dubious “treatment” as if it were just a gripping story. [Read more…]

Marc Stephens no longer has “a professional relationship” with the clinic. The clinic thinks it was inappropriate – yes that’s right, inappropriate – to send “a blogger,” meaning Rhys Morgan, a picture of his own house. The clinic apologizes.

But apology or no apology, the wheels of justice grind exceeding fine: attorneys will be contacting UK bloggers about what the press release says is “inaccurate information.” UK bloggers…why UK bloggers? Could this be another case of libel tourism?

We first heard about loose cannon Marc Stephens’s weird diatribes Monday, when a guy in England informed us that Stephens had earlier this month threatened 17-year-old Welsh blogger Rhys Morgan with a libel suit if Morgan didn’t remove any of his comments questioning the validity of Burzynski’s claims. Morgan is one of several bloggers around the world that Stephens has been threatening. [Read more…]

In Houston, Texas, is a man named Stanislaw Burzynski. He claims he has a method for treating cancer. He calls it antineoplaston therapy. However, according to the National Cancer Institute, “No randomized, controlled trials showing the effectiveness of antineoplastons have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.” That’s a bad sign. Furthermore, the FDA has not approved of antineoplaston therapy for use. Also telling is that “… other investigators have not been able to obtain the same results reported by Dr. Burzynski and his team”. Yet, despite this, Burzynski charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for people to get his therapy — though he has to say they’re participating in research trials, since the FDA won’t allow him to use his ideas as an actual treatment.